White House details new e-mail archiving system

The Obama administration has released details about its archiving system for unclassified White House e-mail messages as part of a settlement agreement with two private groups that sued the Executive Office of the President during the George W. Bush administration over electronic recordkeeping practices.

Brook Colongelo, the chief information officer for the Executive Office of the President's (EOP's) Office of Administration, said the EOP has used EMC Corp.'s EmailXtender as its e-mail storage system for its unclassified network since Obama took office.

• Colangelo said in the letter that the system:
• Is a secure, single, centrally managed e-mail archive.
• Automatically captures messages, including those sent or received via BlackBerry mobile handsets in near real time,
• Can be extracted into a format for transfer to NARA's next-generation Electronic Records Archive.
• Archives messages in original formats with attachments.
• Does regularly scheduled, automated back-ups.
• Provides weekly automated audit reports.
• Can segregate e-mails by component to differentiate between records that are covered by the Presidential Records Act and those that are covered by the Federal Records Act.

Colangelo said the system provides broad search capabilities and dashboard reports on the system's functionality are monitored around the clock at the EOP's network operations center. The system is stored in an off-site and secure location, Colangelo added.